


Towering Inferno

by brihana25



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe, Drama, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 22:05:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1999644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brihana25/pseuds/brihana25
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He'd never believed they'd save the world, and he'd given up hope of saving himself. But maybe, just maybe, he could save the people who mattered to him. Even if they didn't want him to. Even if they hated him. And even if they wouldn't tell him what he'd done wrong before the world burned down around them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written for the 2011 Dark Angel Big Bang, but just before my posting date, my computer ate the full final version. I still had my first draft, and I remembered the way the story had ended up going, but I was so frustrated that I'd lost it that I just put it down and never picked it back up. I felt like a complete failure. hsapiens had even made some phenomenal art for it – a cover, dividers, icons, a header – but I just couldn't do it. I couldn't make myself rewrite it.
> 
> Now, spurred in part by my finally finishing my first NCIS long fic and pushed by a desire to share this story – the one that I alone had seen before it vanished – I'm going to finish it. I'm starting with my original very (very) rough draft, and I'm editing, expanding and revising as I go. As usual, I can make no promises about length between updates. But I can promise you that I will finish it.
> 
> I've promised myself, after all.

He'd never believed that they were going to save the world, but he'd been willing to play along. When things started going bad, he'd comforted himself with the false hope that they might be able to make a difference in Seattle. But with the way their luck had been running for the past few weeks, he'd let go of all pretense of believing anything. He was having a hard enough time just convincing himself that maybe they might be able to save themselves.

No, that wasn't right. It wasn't the way their luck had been running; it was that their luck was running out. The days of being unknown, unfeared, and unthreatened were over. Transgenics were quite literally the talk of the town, and not a day went by that there weren't at least three stories about the freaks and mutants in the news somewhere. The media had latched on to Annie Fisher's death so fiercely that they were running retrospectives and memorial broadcasts about her every other day. Joshua's picture had been on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Stories about monsters that could pass for human, like the girl who had helped "The Wolfman" escape, were starting to spread.

They'd been exposed, compromised, brought to the attention of the world-at-large. They were being hunted and killed in the streets. They'd lost almost everything, and they were on the verge of losing even more. And what had they gained? 

"A big, fat nothing."

"I wouldn't go that far." Logan looked back at Alec across his shoulder as they exited the elevator and crossed the foyer to his penthouse apartment. "It may not have been the most productive mission ever, but it wasn't a complete loss."

Alec followed Logan through the door, taking off his leather jacket as he went. He crossed the living room, tossed the jacket on the couch, and then moved to stand in front of the bank of windows that dominated the front wall of the apartment. He crossed his arms as he stared out at Seattle's moonlit skyline. He hadn't even been thinking about the mission they'd just returned from, but now that Logan had brought it up, he could see how their recent failure might have contributed to his thoughts of hopelessness.

"I'd hate to see what you consider a complete loss then, buddy. Because we didn't get jack."

"We got a lot of valuable information." 

Logan's voice sounded funny, shorter and more abrupt than usual, and that was how he'd sounded all night. Come to think of it, that's how he'd sounded for a few weeks. Since the night Annie died, to be exact. 

Alec was no expert on human behavior, but he knew enough to realize that something was wrong. 

"If we put what we got tonight together with what Matt Sung already has, we'll probably have enough to get an arrest, at least, if not a conviction."

"But there wasn't anything there." Alec was tired, and he didn't care if his voice sounded it. He turned away from the window, walked over to the couch, and sat down. "No stolen prescriptions, no suspicious records, no late-night shipments coming or going." As he talked, he ticked off each item on his fingers. "No money, no paper trail, no guns, no ammunition. Nothing."

"No proof of legitimacy, either," Logan pointed out.

"Since when do pharmaceutical companies need to prove that they're legit?" Alec asked. "I thought it was our job to prove they're not. Isn't that why we were sneaking around out there? Trying to find something we could use to prove they're the bad guys?"

Logan sighed and sat down in his desk chair. "We did a good thing tonight," he said. "You'll see that in time."

"Yeah." Alec wanted it to be sarcastic, but he was too apathetic to make it convincing. He started playing with the zipper of the jacket that lay on the couch next to him. "I'm sure I will."

Logan turned away from him and focused on firing his computer system up.

Alec glanced up and studied Logan from across the room. Normally, Logan would be talking his ear off, trying to convince him that they were making the world safe for humans and Transgenics alike, giving him some big speech about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, expounding on all the great things the scraps of useless information they'd brought back would do. But instead, he was sitting silently at his desk, with his shoulders up around his ears and tension radiating off of him like heat from a fire.

Something was wrong with Logan, all right. And even though he had no idea what it was, Alec couldn't help feeling that whatever it was, he was the cause of it. He sighed and looked back down at the zipper as he replayed the night in his mind, trying to figure out just what he'd done to piss him off.

It was supposed to be a recon and, if necessary, minor assault on the manufacturing center and warehouse for what Logan suspected was an illegal prescription drug smuggling ring. Logan's informant had led him to believe that there were stockpiles of all manner of strictly regulated narcotics and medicine - painkillers, anesthetics, and human growth hormones just to name a few. There was also supposed to be a large amount of cash on the what they were told would be a heavily-guarded premises. 

But there was nothing. There was a moderately stocked warehouse filled with crates which bore shipping labels and bar codes that all, according to Logan's own scanner, checked out as legitimate, above-board shipments from the manufacturers to the warehouse's address. There was no proof that they'd come from – or were intended to go to – anywhere else.

There were also no employees present on the grounds, no guards of any kind, and no cash anywhere to be found. They'd managed to dig out a few questionably worded contracts, but that didn't help their case much. MediTech claimed to be a real pharmaceutical distributor, and nothing they'd found had contradicted that. 

They'd taken pictures of everything in the safe and almost everything in the filing cabinets. Logan was going to print them out and collate them, and then sift through them with a fine-toothed comb. It was going to take a lot more luck than they'd had in a while to come up with any evidence worth taking to Matt Sung.

Alec doubted that the results would be worth it.

Then again, he was starting to doubt almost everything about what the three of them did together, up to and including whether or not he would keep doing it. He'd felt like an outsider from the moment he realized that he'd somehow managed to become one of Eyes Only's operatives. After a few successful missions and a few nights spent relaxing at Crash, that feeling had started to fade, but lately, it seemed to have returned. With a vengeance. 

He and Max had been arguing almost all night, and that was a situation that was becoming far too commonplace for his liking. She'd finally told him about Ben, so he understood why being around him upset her so much. And he'd tried to avoid doing or saying things that he thought would upset her. He'd been putting actual, sincere effort into not being his usual obnoxious and irritating self, but it didn't seem to be working. 

If anything, she was angrier at him than she'd been in months. So when she'd said that she was going to swing by Joshua's instead of going straight back to the apartment with them, he hadn't argued. To be honest, he'd felt no small sense of relief to be getting a break from her. 

That had lasted until she sped off on her bike, and he realized that he was going to be riding back to Fogle Towers in Logan's car, and Logan was just as pissed at him – for whatever he'd done without knowing he'd done it – as Max was. To say the least, the atmosphere in the car had been uncomfortable. And now they were stuck together in the apartment, still not really speaking to each other.

"Hand me the camera." Logan's voice pulled his attention back to the present. "I need to get started printing those pictures."

Alec stared at his back blankly. "I don't have the camera."

"Yes, you do," Logan argued. He spun around in his chair. "I gave it to you before we got in the car."

"No, you didn't," Alec argued right back. "You sure you didn't give it to Max?"

"Yes, I'm sure I didn't give it to Max. I knew she wasn't coming back with us, and I wanted to get started printing before she gets here. You know how she gets when she's with Joshua. Who knows when she'll make it back?"

Alec shrugged.

"I gave it to you."

Alec shook his head. "Photographic memory, Logan." He tapped his finger against his temple. "You did not give it to me."

Logan wrinkled his forehead in concentration. Alec could see it in his eyes and on his face, watched him run through his memories and sort out which went where. Then he sighed.

"It's in the back seat," he said. "Probably on the floorboard."

Alec nodded. Logan's next question was obvious, so he thought he'd save him the trouble of asking it.

"You want me to go get it?"

Logan rolled his eyes as he turned back to his computer. "Well, unless you think I should hook your brain up to my computer and download your 'photographic memory,' yes. Probably."

Alec lowered his eyebrows and shook his head. 

"No need to be a bitch about it," he finally said as he pushed himself to his feet. "I'll run down and get it."

"Good."

Alec picked up his jacket. He looked down at it, then out the window again. He didn't like the way Logan was acting. He had half a mind to head down to the garage and just keep walking. Go home. Get on his bike and take off. Leave Logan Cale and Eyes Only and Max Guevara in his rearview mirror and just leave. Just be done. But for some reason he couldn't explain, he knew he could never do it. 

Since he couldn't run away from it, maybe he should try to fix it. He ran his hand through his hair and turned back around. 

"Logan, man, I'm getting a vibe from you. Have I done something wrong? Something to piss you off?"

Logan just snorted, brought up his file window on his computer and started typing. "Don't pretend you don't know."

Alec blinked at the man's back. How could he pretend he didn't know something he didn't know? And if Logan wouldn't tell him what it was, how was he supposed to know if he knew? Why were humans so damn confusing?

"But, I really don't ..."

"Just go get the camera," Logan said dismissively. "I don't want to talk about this right now."

Alec held his hand up in surrender. "Fine. Whatever."

He tossed his jacket over his shoulder and headed for the elevator. It opened, he stepped inside, and turned back around to hit the button for the garage. As the doors slid closed, he could see Logan, still at his desk, glaring daggers at him across the room. 

Alec shook his head and closed his eyes.

He really didn't understand humans.

* * *

"You know," Logan said to himself. He turned back to his computer and pounded on the keys angrily. "How could you not know? Of course you know."

Alec knew why he was mad at him. Who wouldn't be mad at the guy who'd stolen the woman he loved right out from under him? 

He'd tried, for Max's sake, to let it go. He'd tried to convince himself that Alec could protect her, that they were literally made for each other, that Max was happy and that was what really mattered. But he couldn't do it. He and Alec had never been close, but they'd at least been able to call each other friend. They'd at least had each other's backs. But no more. No matter how hard Logan tried, he just couldn't forgive Alec for what he'd done.

"Just couldn't wait, could you? Didn't give a damn about me, or her, or anybody else. You wanted her, so you took her, and you want to pretend that you don't know."

Alec knew exactly how Logan felt about Max, knew how much he loved her, and he'd moved in on her anyway. And not just harmless flirting, no, a full-blown relationship that they'd been carrying on behind his back for who-knew-how long. 

"Of course you know."

So why did the look on his face say he didn't?

* * *

Alec tipped his head back and closed his eyes. He'd never been big on understanding human emotions, even though it was in his dossier at Manticore as one of his specialties. He'd learned to manipulate them, yes, but that wasn't hard. He'd learned to interpret the ones on the surface and work them to his advantage, but only when it was required by Manticore. He'd never seen a point in placating them, or in trying to judge their moods or the reasoning behind the things they did. To him, humans were just another curiosity, to be studied only if doing so would be beneficial to him personally or to the goals of his mission.

He was damn good at getting humans to do what he wanted them to do, but he was terrible at reading how they felt and understanding why they felt that way.

"What do I know?" he asked himself. "What did I do?"

He knew Logan was pissed at him. That much was painfully obvious. He didn't need to be an expert in human emotions to see that. 

But it had also seemed, as the mission and the night had gone on, that he was mad at Max, too. And Logan had plainly said that Alec should have known why he was angry. But his genius-level IQ and photographic memory weren't doing him any good, because he had absolutely no idea what Logan could possibly be so upset about.

No, the mission hadn't gone well at all, but that wasn't his fault. And hadn't Logan just been defending its accomplishments not five minutes earlier? Telling him that it would all be worth it, that the information they'd gotten would be put to good use shutting down a ring of illegal drug smugglers? And if Logan had been mad at him before the mission, about something that had nothing to do with it, he wouldn't have taken him along in the first place, would he? After all, Logan and Max had managed just fine for a year together before Alec came along.

"Don't need me," he muttered. "Never have."

He thought back over the past several weeks, from a time when Logan still tolerated him to the first time he'd noticed that had changed. Everything he'd done, everything he'd said, everything he'd been part of. That night at Crash, the night Logan got sick, everything had been normal. Alec had been the one who caught him when he fell, the one who stayed by his side, touching his face and chest to check his breathing and heartbeat, talking to him to keep him alert and conscious. Max had called him, asked him to come to the hospital … so things had obviously still been okay then. They wouldn't have wanted him there if they hated him, would they? He'd never made it, of course, but that wasn't his fault and Logan understood that. 

"That's not it. Logan knows about Ben. He knows I'm no psycho murderer."

Then Annie happened.

That was when Logan started giving him the cold shoulder, he realized. They'd spent the whole day together, trying to get Max, Joshua and Annie out of the sewer safe and in one piece. Max and Joshua made it; Annie didn't. Logan hadn't talked to him much that day, and the ride back to Joshua's place had been downright uncomfortable. He'd commented on it at the time, asking Max what Logan's problem was. 

She hadn't answered him.

At the time, he'd chalked it up to Logan being worried about Max. They'd been having problems before that, he knew. Max had been refusing to talk to Logan, and Logan had to do a video hack just to reach out to her. But looking back on it, he could see that it was more than that. Logan had been irritated when he'd called him and found out they were together, even though he'd called him in the first place, which meant he'd thought they'd be together anyway. So whatever was going on had been going on for at least a week. And he was just picking up on it?

"Face it, Alec. You aren't bad at human emotions. You suck at them."

Even more confusing to Alec than Logan's anger, though, was how worried he was about it. They worked together, looked out for each other, but in the end, Logan was just another human, just another Ordinary. They got upset about the dumbest things, and he had no doubt that whatever had Logan so mad was just as dumb. 

Why did it bother him that the man was mad at him? It shouldn't have. Three months earlier, it wouldn't have. He'd shrugged off a lot of things that had happened to Logan, or complaints that Logan had about him, in the past eight months. He'd been doing it that long, why couldn’t he do it anymore?

Was this what Max had meant when she told him that the more time he spent on the outside, the more human he'd feel? The more protective he'd be of the Ordinaries around him, no matter what?

If it was, he wasn't sure he liked it. In fact, he was pretty damn sure he didn't.

One thing he did know was that before the night was over, he was going to find out exactly what the hell was wrong with Logan, and exactly what he'd done to cause it. And he'd probably even try to make amends for it, if possible.

His decision made, he sighed, folded his arms across his chest and settled back to lean against the wall of the elevator.

He'd just passed the seventeenth floor when he heard a distant sound from far beneath him. He wondered briefly about it, about how loud it would had to have been to be heard from that far away. The elevator shook and rumbled, then slammed to a stop.

"What the hell?"

Alec grabbed the handrail and pulled himself up from the floor. 

Then the alarm started screaming and the lights went out.


	2. Chapter 2

Logan looked up from his computer when the blaring screech started. It took him by surprise, and he spun in his chair, trying to figure out where it was coming from. It seemed to be emanating from the walls themselves, echoing between them, and bouncing off the floor and ceiling. His ears were already ringing, and his head was starting to hurt.

It took him longer than it should have to realize it was the fire alarm.

He'd never heard it before.

In all the years he'd lived there, there'd never been a fire in Fogle Towers that had set it off. Each apartment had its own sprinkler system, so even if there had been a small grease fire or two, they'd been extinguished long before the building's system kicked in. If the building-wide alarm was going off, that meant the catastrophic fire event protocol had been activated. The fire department would have already been notified. Sprinklers would be showering the hallways with water, fire retardant would be flooding the stairwells, the fire break doors would be slamming shut, and the elevators would be disabled.

Elevators.

"Alec."

He pushed himself up from his chair and jogged across the apartment. The numbers above the elevator were dark. He hoped that Alec had made it to the garage before whatever triggered the alarm had happened, but he knew it wasn't possible. Alec had been gone for less than a minute when the alarm started, and it took almost three minutes for the elevator to make the entire trip down.

"Alec!"

He pressed his ear against the doors, but he didn't know what he was listening for. He heard some creaks and groans from the cables, but there was no squealing or banging that might indicate the elevator had fallen. He didn't hear any screaming or crying from the floors below, but he was so far above the other residents, and the alarm was blaring so loudly in his ears, he doubted he'd have heard them anyway.

He patted himself down, as if he might have something on him that could fix everything. He didn't, of course. Frustrated, anxious, and maybe even a little bit worried, he pounded on the metal doors and called out again.

"Alec!"

"Stop screaming." The irritated voice took him by surprise, and he stepped back from the doors in surprise. "The alarm's bad enough."

"Alec?"

"Who else would it be?" The voice was right in his ear, but a quick glance to his right told him that no one was there. A light chuckle followed. "Guess we were too busy arguing about where the camera is to dump comms when we got back."

Logan took a deep breath and let the thinly veiled snark go by without comment. He must have hit the button by accident, and it was a good thing he did. He had a line of communication to Alec, and that was what mattered.

"Hey, you all right?" he asked. "Where are you?"

"In the elevator." Alec's tone of voice spoke volumes about his opinion on the ridiculousness of the question.

Logan rolled his eyes. "No, I mean where. Which floor?"

"Oh, um ..." Alec sounded distracted, as though he were looking around. "There's no number lit up, so I'm between floors, right?"

"Not necessarily. When the fire system activated, it stopped the elevators wherever they happened to be at the time. You might be between floors, but you might not. What's the last floor you remember passing?"

"I think it was seventeen."

He knew that it wasn't the time for his anger to surface, but he couldn't stop himself. "What happened to that photographic memory of yours?"

He heard the sigh, and he immediately regretted his words. "I don't usually need to pay attention to the floors I'm passing in your elevator, so I didn't."

Logan shook his head at his own choice of conversation. Yes, he was mad at Alec, but the kid was stuck in an elevator during what seemed to be one hell of a fire somewhere in the building. Picking a fight with him was childish.

"I'm sorry," he muttered.

"It's okay." Another sigh, but it was one of resignation and not frustration. Logan filed the reaction away to think about later as he ran through the layout of the floors in his head.

"If you're on sixteen, there's a fire escape you can get to at the other end of the hallway. Can you get out? You probably shouldn't stay in there, anyway."

"Give me a minute." Alec was quiet for a few seconds, except for exhalations and small grunts of effort. "Doors don't want to open."

"Do you know what happened?" Logan asked. His mind was racing a million miles a minute at the implications of a fire in his building. The timing of it was bothering him a whole lot. If he and Alec hadn't just been coming back from a mission, everyone in the building would have been asleep when it started. "Did you see or hear anything before the alarm?"

"Um, yeah," Alec answered. His voice was distracted, and Logan couldn't help but wonder what he was doing. "There was some kind of noise below me right before the elevator started shaking."

"Noise?" Logan asked. "I didn't hear anything up here. What kind of noise? Like a bang or a boom or a … ?"

"A noise, Logan!" Alec ground out. "I don't know what it was, or where it was, just that it was below me. Somewhere. And it was loud."

Logan's mind shifted gears again, and he focused on the second half of what Alec had said. "Wait, the elevator shook? How badly?"

"It knocked me down." Logan's eyes widened a bit at the thought of an elevator shaking badly enough to throw someone who'd been built and bred for grace and stability to the floor. "It's still shaking, but not as bad."

His eyes widened even further. "Elevators aren't supposed to shake, Alec. If they do, there's something wrong with them."

"Yeah, I know that." Alec went silent in his ear, and Logan started to worry.

"You need to hurry." The creaks he'd been hearing from the other side of the closed elevator doors were growing louder, and they'd been joined by a number of squeals that echoed up through the shaft. Whatever the noise that Alec had heard was, it seemed to have damaged something important.

"Working on it." It was less a sentence and more a groan of effort.

He was running out of words to describe the sounds that were coming through the doors, but they were rising in pitch, volume, and frequency. He could hear the screech of metal and wires pushed to their breaking point rise up from below the noise to soar above it all.

"You need to get out of there," Logan said. "Now. You need to get out now."

Something snapped behind the doors, and for a second, everything was strangely quiet. Then whatever it was slammed against the elevator door with enough force that it dented all the way through, and Logan had to step back again. The screeching sounds resumed, but as a grinding scream of metal-on-metal as the braking mechanism beneath the elevator tried desperately to hold itself up without the aid of whatever had just given way.

"No."

The whispered word had barely passed his lips when something that sounded like an explosion echoed through the shaft. Instantly, the sounds of straining metal and snapping cables began fading away as the elevator plummeted downward, taking the pit of Logan's stomach with it.  
  
"No!"

The only response was the far-off sound of imploding and exploding elevator as it slammed to the concrete floor in the parking garage, twenty floors below.

For one silent moment, Logan stared at the badly deformed elevator doors that Alec had walked through less than three minutes before. His heart pounded, and his breath had frozen in his lungs. How had such a normal night gone so tragically wrong in such a short amount of time?

Logan put both hands against the elevator doors and leaned his head against them.   
  
"Alec!"

* * *

Alec heard Logan's frantic calls, and he knew he should answer him, but he didn't have the energy or the oxygen to do it. He'd managed to get the doors open just as the elevator had started screeching and sliding downward, and he'd launched himself out of it head-first just before the entire thing was consumed by an explosion that came from above. He'd tucked and rolled when he hit the floor, but he'd been flying so fast and hit it so hard that he'd knocked the wind out of himself. He'd also managed to do something to his left shoulder, but it didn't hurt badly enough to be broken or dislocated, so he decided to ignore it.

He'd pulled his feet clear less than a second before the elevator plummeted down the shaft. He was lying in the middle of a hallway, flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling above him, gasping in painful breaths and trying to settle the adrenaline that coursed through his veins. There was an unnatural and vaguely disturbing silence in the hallway, but after the overwhelming noise of the past few minutes, it was almost a welcome respite.

"Too close," he muttered. "Too damn close."

"Alec?" Logan's voice still had an edge to it, but he didn't sound as desperate as he had before. "You okay?"

Alec nodded his head slowly, but then he realized that Logan couldn't see him. "I'm out," he gasped. "Can't breathe, think I jacked my shoulder a bit, but I'm out."

"Good. That's good." There was a moment of silence, and Alec closed his eyes and laid his head back on the floor. "Where are you?"

He opened his eyes reluctantly, and he looked up at the wall next to the elevator. "Sign says sixteen," he finally answered. He laid his head back again, closed his eyes, and drew another deep breath. "The elevator exploded, Logan. It exploded. There had to have been a bomb or something on top of it. Blew the thing apart."

More silence, and then a quiet, "Yeah. I thought that's what I heard."

"You know what that means, right?" Alec didn't doubt for a second that Logan knew what it meant. Logan had probably known what the whole thing meant from almost the beginning.

"It means someone is doing this on purpose," was Logan's answer. "It also means that the noise you heard beneath you was probably an explosion, too."

"Who are they after?" he wondered out loud. "Who are they trying to kill?" The pain in his shoulder had faded to a dull ache, and he was finding it easier to breathe, but he needed another few seconds before he could get off the floor.

"Two explosions, one at the bottom of the shaft and one on top of the elevator that should have been right outside my apartment?" Logan sighed. "Not much doubt who they're after."

"So who is it?" Alec opened his eyes and moved his arms experimentally. "Manticore? Conclave? Someone Eyes Only put away?"

"I don't think it matters," Logan answered. "What matters is what they've done, and what they're going to do next. We know about two explosions, but the fire alarm is going off, which means there's a fire, and we need to …"

"There's no alarm." Logan's words reminded him of the silence that surrounded him, and he realized why it had felt so wrong when he'd noticed it earlier. "Logan, there's no alarm going off down here." He leaned his head back far enough to look down the hallway, and he rolled to his stomach. "There's smoke," he said, as he pushed himself slowly to his knees. "There's smoke everywhere, and it's hot, but there's no alarm."

"That's impossible," Logan answered. "If it's going off up here and in the elevator, then it's going off in the whole building. That's the way it's designed."

"Someone just blew up the elevator and apparently set the whole place on fire. Tell me they couldn't have disabled the fire alarm before they did it."

"Then no one else knows there's anything wrong." The panic had returned to Logan's voice, and Alec leaned against the wall for support as he forced himself to his feet. "What about the sprinklers? Are they going off?"

Alec was standing, perfectly dry, against the wall in a hallway that he'd been lying on the floor of for more than a minute. The answer to that one was obvious. "No."

"Alec, we've got to …"

"Yeah," he said. "We do." Barely ten minutes earlier, he'd all but given up on saving people, but there was no way he was going to walk out of that building and leave anyone behind. "I'm on sixteen, so tell me. Does anyone live on this floor?"

Alec could picture Logan in his mind, running through the residents of Fogle Towers in his head. "No. No one lives on sixteen." The sounds of rapid typing came through Alec's earwig, but Logan kept talking. "There's a young family on eighteen, though, and an elderly man who lives alone on nineteen."

Alec began moving down the hallway, slowly at first, but picking up speed as he shook off the last of the effects from his experience with the elevator. The tap-tap-tap of Logan's keyboard continued. "What are you doing?"

"I've got to upload the Informant Net," was the answer. "If we're right, this whole place is set to go up. I can't lose this. I've got to send it to …"

"Do you have a way out?" Alec had reached the main stairs in the center of the building. The smoke was heavier there, and he had to crouch beneath it as he started up them.

"Don't worry about me," Logan snapped. "I'll do what I have to do. You just worry about getting everyone else out of the building."

Alec ran up the stairs two at a time. He went past eighteen, thinking it best to get to the elderly man first. As he ran, he pictured Logan's apartment in his mind. He'd never seen any way in or out other than the elevator. If there was an access door to the roof, he didn't know where it was. Max had told him that she'd jumped out the window to a balcony a few floors below once, but he didn't think Logan could pull that off. Even if he'd been wearing the exoskeleton, which he wasn't, the odds of him landing something like that were astronomical.

"Hey, Logan," he asked as he reached the top of the stairs and saw that they stopped at the nineteenth floor. "Just curious. Where are the stairs to your place?"

"There aren't any." Logan was still typing, and his words were short and clipped. "I had them sealed when I moved in."

"You what?" Alec was floored. Who in their right mind closed off the only way to escape a twentieth-floor apartment? "Then how are you going to …?"

"I said don't worry about me!" Logan shouted his answer, and for a second, Alec thought that the still-unexplained anger had returned. "Have you seen any flames yet?"

"No." Alec had reached the nineteenth floor, and he moved down the hallway quickly. "Lots of smoke, though, and it's hot as hell up here. There's definitely fire somewhere. I wonder if they managed to keep it in the walls."

"Even if they did, it'll break through at some point. If you're feeling the heat from it, probably sooner rather than later."

Alec had reached the only door on the nineteenth floor that had a number next to it, and he knocked on it loudly. "Sir?" he called out. "Sir, can you hear me?"

"Charles," Logan said. "His name is Charles Langston."

"Mr. Langston!" he called out, pounding on the door even harder. "Charles, can you hear me? Mr. Langston!"

"The fire escape goes all the way to nineteen," Logan said. "You can get Charles down from there, then you can …"

"You don't have a fire escape, either?!"

The door opened, and Charles Langston, clad in only a pair of pajama pants and a robe, glasses slightly askew on his face, was standing in front of him. "What the hell are you …"

"Mr. Langston," Alec said quickly. "Sir, there's a fire. I'm here to take you down to the …"

"There's no fire!" the older man protested. "There's an alarm for that sort of thing. They don't send kids running from apartment to apartment waking people up in the dead of night for …" He put his hand on the door and started to close it in Alec's face. Alec put his hand up and stopped him. He ignored the angry glare in the ice-blue eyes and gestured down the smoke-filled hallway.   
  
"Yeah, well, the alarm doesn't seem to be working. So tonight, you've got me."

Charles glanced down the hallway, and then he nodded his head. He tied his robe closed, shut his door behind him, and began walking confidently down the hallway. Alec stared after him, surprised by how quickly the man had gone from angry and argumentative to calm and focused.

"Well, aren't you coming?" he asked as he rounded the entrance to the stairs. "If this building's on fire, we need to get out while we still can."

Alec jogged to catch up with him, looking back over his shoulder to the window at the end of the hallway. "The fire escape is …"

"I know where it is," Charles returned. "But I know those kids on eighteen. If you think I'm leaving without them, son, you're crazy."

* * *

The young family on the eighteenth floor, the Andersons and their three children, took a bit longer to get up and moving. With Charles' help, they were out of their apartment relatively quickly, with Alec carrying a frightened but sleepy three-year-old boy in his arms as they made their way down the hallway to the window at the end. The smoke was thicker than it had been only moments before, and Alec was starting to see the first signs of flames licking at the edges of the ceiling tiles above them.

The fire was definitely in the walls, and Logan was right. It wouldn't be long before it started to break through.

"Everyone down," he directed as they neared the window. "As low as you can. Stay below the smoke."

He handed the boy to Charles, then turned to the window and tried to pull it open. Even with his enhanced strength, it wouldn't budge. "Logan," he said softly, hoping that no one else would be able to hear him. "The windows are sealed shut."

"Damn it," Logan growled. "This isn't a spur-of-the-moment job. They've been planning this for a while." He coughed, and Alec wondered how much of the smoke they were dealing with in the hallways had made its way to the top floor. "Can you get them out?"

Alec smirked and wiped at the sweat that was starting to run down his face. "Of course I can." He turned back to the people on the floor and raised his voice. "Cover your eyes," he said. "Everyone cover your eyes."

As soon as they had done so, he turned back to the window again. He looked at the glass, then at his still-throbbing left shoulder, and shrugged. "Here goes nothing," he said. He wrapped his right hand around his left and slammed his left elbow into the glass. It shook, and it cracked, but it didn't break. He hit it again, and again, and he was rewarded with a gush of fresh night air as the glass gave way. He took a few seconds to clear the shards from the frame before turning back to his charges again.

"Out you go," he said. He helped Mr. Anderson to his feet first, and Alec held the young girl he had been carrying as he climbed up and through the window. As soon as he was stable on the landing, Alec handed his daughter back to him. Mrs. Anderson was next, and Alec repeated the process, holding her infant son while she made her way out. After he'd handed the baby off, he reached for the toddler in Charles' arms. "Can you get them down, Mr. Langston?" he asked as he helped the older man up and through the window. "Will you be okay?"

Charles nodded as he reached for the little boy. "There's no one else above ten," he said. "And it sounds like the fire department is on their way." Alec could hear them, too, and had probably heard them before Charles had. Sirens, dozens of them, sounded in the distance, echoing through the still of the night and bouncing between the buildings. They were definitely headed their direction. Whether the alarm in Logan's apartment had alerted them or Logan had called them, Alec didn't know, but it didn't matter. The people on the lower floors would be safe, and Charles Langston and the Andersons would be, too.

Charles moved out of the way to make room for Alec on the landing, but Alec shook his head.

There was no way out of Logan's apartment. There was no door to the roof, he'd sealed the stairs, and the fire escape stopped at the nineteenth floor. The elevator had been the only way in or out, and he knew that. He knew that as surely as he knew that Logan had no intention of leaving.

"This may be your only chance to get out, son," Charles said.

Alec smirked again. "I know it is," he said, "But I know that guy on twenty. And if you think I'm leaving without him, sir, you're crazy."


End file.
